Aces High Default Tile sets.

[bustr]

If I'm not seeking to modify any of the files for new effects but, instead, create my own tile set from all of the tile sets Hitech posted. As long as I follow Easycor's instructions for setting up all the file groups to be seen by the TE in proper order, the files for each tile set group are not created in some way to only work with each other?

There looks to be a few bmp files that would work better in a terrain theme as exposed rock mountain sides for locations in the Euro set or Med set, both are very limited for available rock face tiles. On all of my terrains, I used for the most part about 6 of the 16 tiles to do 98% of the painting through blending for effects. I suspect I will have to experiment in replacing one tree and clutter type for another since Pacific island fauna does not grow all over Scandinavia and the same in turn for other geographic regions. The Pac tile set is the best general theme tile set of the three default MA sets. European mountains and rock is not all dolomite nor are Med and African mountains all made of sand stone.

[CptTrips]

If I'm not seeking to modify any of the files for new effects but, instead, create my own tile set from all of the tile sets Hitech posted. As long as I follow Easycor's instructions for setting up all the file groups to be seen by the TE in proper order, the files for each tile set group are not created in some way to only work with each other?

I'm not sure if I am parsing your question correctly. 

However, if you are suggesting merely substituting textures from another terrset, as far as I know, if they are the same size (508 vs 1016), and you update the atlas and catlas txt files accordingly, it should work.  If you are asking how the transition blending works, it is a function of the textures order in the atlas and the order in which you lay them down in the terrain editor. See Easyscor's terrain manual starting page 29. http://ahghelp.hitechcreations.com/help/uploads/images/terredit/AH3%20Terrain%20Editors.pdf]

The tricky part will be the SWA file associated with the texture name.  If you are substituting a Pac texture into a Euro terrset, you could end up with palm trees in Germany. 
If you rename the texture to the Euro name, the SWA objects might not line up well with the contents of the texture.  Or you could use a blank SWA or edit a new one.


Is that what you were asking?

 

[bustr]

There are some rock tiles that didn't end up in the default tile sets. After my three terrain building experience, they were sorely needed. After finding the unused tiles in the default tile downloads from Hitech, I'm a little miffed. I spent two years asking for tiles like them.....

Yes, to make my version of the Euro tile set reshuffled using those rock tiles, I may need to change what trees and clutter is associated to them. I'm thinking about turning the 4 villages on the 2x2 tile into 4 1x1 or maybe only 2 1x1 since we now have view only road paths. The rock tiles I found would work well doing granite features like you find on Svalbard island. Scandinavia and much of Europe is not made of dolomite which is the only rock tile in the current Euro tile set. And the rift valley in east africa is not made totally of sand stone since it's an area shaped by the resultant volcanic activity created by tectonic plates pulling apart. There is much more granite, lava, and limestone in the Med area and African than sand stone.

I want to shuffle the decks so to say with what my experience helped me conclude about the topographical themes I created. Since Waffle's tiles are so far trouble free in the MA, I want to avoid as much as I can introducing problems with custom work. I'm used to blowing up the terrain editor with the things I test..

[CptTrips]

If you need to edit or create a SWA, note that there is some folder goofiness you have to work around.  See Easyscor's solution here:
https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,395162.msg5242454.html#msg5242454

[bustr]

Thanks, it's easier than poking tigers with a willow switch to check gender.....

[ghostdancer]

Check with HiTech first before you start working on custom tiles. While we have no issue with them in the SEA and AvA I am not sure he will allow custom tileset in the MA.

[bustr]

Right now all I want is to experiment with the cliff.bmp and craters.bmp from the 1016 atlas. I spent two years wishing for a stone tile like cliff and it had always been there in terrset02. So I'm using 02 on my test terrain to see how it drives. I never liked the textured dolomite I was limited to with BowlMA but, it was the only textured rock available. After three terrains I have a good idea about blending of tiles and how many of the 508 tiles you actually paint with versus the transitions make half the 508 not worth using. The Med tileset, the upper 8 508 are not worth using unless you choose only them to do the terrain. The transitions are horrendous while Atlas 1 Type 18 is a sandstone scrub tree pattern that I ended up using as a strata level across all of the valley walls, and to break up repeating patterns.

There is a 1016 called mountain with interesting textures and why I was musing splitting some of the 1016 into quarters for use as 508. The farm lands and village 1016 work better as 1016 for the boarder transition effects when painted with mixed 508. But, a single village from the 1016 as a 508 would allow more granular placement in a theme. As I said, using what Hitech has sanctioned already works better if I can mix\match and I mostly never used more than 6 or so of the 508 tiles due to the  boarder transition issues. That leads back to a wish for a universal transition tile to clean up transitions. And Atlas 1 Type 18 always works that way but, the design on that 1016 was not often a good design to see on the boarder between two dissimilar level 508 like laying type 6 down on type 15.

The tile pallets from the Terrsets remind me of art contests where you are given a limited pallet of color pencils and an hour to crank something out. If you pull up Oceania and riftval offline and fly around in CMeye you will see what I'm getting at.

[bustr]

In terrset02 from the download the atlas1 file shows the following:

atlas,C:\art\ah2\stdtexnew\atlas\terrset02
1024,ImageSize
4,ChannelCnt
2,rows
2,cols
../1016/farm1.bmp
../1016/village.bmp
../1016/craters.bmp
../1016/cliff.bmp

My project path to it is: C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High III\ah3terr\oflintrn\terrset00

And this is the change I've made.

atlas
1024,ImageSize
4,ChannelCnt
2,rows
2,cols
../1016/farm1.bmp
../1016/village.bmp
../1016/mountain.bmp
../1016/cliff.bmp

I followed Easyscore's instructions from the sticky for creating folder structures and filling them.

https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,387747.0.html

Along with the path changes to atlas0 and atlas1. To see trees on the tiles I had to add a second spdtree\swa and fill that swa with swa files.

C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High III\ah3terr\oflintrn\terrset00\spdtree\swa\spdtree\swa


Back to atlas1 and my change.

I replaced craters.bmp with mountain.bmp out of the 1016 folder. I copied all of the files for both craters.bmp and mountain.bmp into the oflintrn\tersset00\texsrc folder. When I run a build in the TE of this terrain oflintrn it shows the custom tiles being recognized.

When I open the TE to this project I have no way to access these tiles. The tileset I modified is the WW1 terrset02 by swaping craters.bmp with mountain.bmp.

[CptTrips]

I'm not exactly sure of your problem, but let me point out a few things I did to get mine working. 

1.  I copied ALL bitmaps for the terrset02 to the texsrc folder.  Not jsut the ones I was replacing.

2.  I changed the paths in the atlas text files to be relative to where the atlas files resided.  So mine looked like:
 
atlas,
512,ImageSize
4,ChannelCnt
4,rows
4,cols
texsrc\sand.bmp
texsrc\dunes.bmp
texsrc\dryscrub.bmp
texsrc\drygrass.bmp
texsrc\erosiongrass.bmp
texsrc\grass1.bmp
texsrc\decidforest.bmp
texsrc\grassfeild0.bmp
texsrc\grassfeilds.bmp
texsrc\roughgrass.bmp
texsrc\pineforest.bmp
texsrc\highmeadow.bmp
texsrc\urban.bmp
texsrc\rock.bmp
texsrc\rocksnow.bmp
texsrc\snow.bmp

*If I didn't have one of the bitmaps the atlas referenced in the texsrc folder, or I didn't have the paths defined properly, the the TE just reverted back to the standard tiles.

Let me know if I can help further.  I'm happy to pay forward the help I received.

[CptTrips]

BTW.  The problem I found was that doing it like the above adds 80mb to the terrain res file.   

If you find a way to just use the one texture you are replacing, please let me know.  I replaced two textures and like the results, but can't swallow the 80mb file size increase!


 

[bustr]

Sometimes being literal gets me in trouble...

Your path
texsrc\urban.bmp

My path

../1016/mountain.bmp

Meh......gurglesnort. Lets see what happens with a little notepading.

[CptTrips]

So my atlas txts live in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Aces High III\ah3terr\myterr\terrset02

I have all my bitmaps under:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Aces High III\ah3terr\myterr\terrset02\texsrc

My written swa are in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Aces High III\ah3terr\myterr\terrset02\spdtree\swa

The one I open to edit has to go in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Aces High III\ah3terr\myterr\terrset02\spdtree\swa\spdtree\swa

BTW, make sure your swa file is not marked read-only.  The OE will lie and act like it saves, but it actually won't in that case.

[bustr]

They is all marked read only, in both swa, gotta uncheck all that. And I reset the relative paths in the atlas0 and atlas1 sitting in terrset00, still no joy. Running a TE build recognizes the path to terrset00 but I still don't get craters.bmp replaced by mountain.bmp and I copied every bitmap over from terrset02 like you recommended. Should the build show more path when --Creating set ah3terr/oflinter/terrset00-- or is it seeing enough for the TE to know the folder structure and files are the tile set to be used?

The object editor shows me the tiles and trees:

C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High III\ah3terr\oflintrn\terrset00\spdtree\swa\dryscrub.swa


ah3terr
-------oflinter
                  stdshape
                  terrset00
                             spdtree
                                      swa
                                          spdtree
                                                   swa
                              texsrc
                    texsrc


atlas,
512,ImageSize
4,ChannelCnt
4,rows
4,cols
texsrc\sand.bmp
texsrc\dunes.bmp
texsrc\dryscrub.bmp
texsrc\drygrass.bmp
texsrc\erosiongrass.bmp
texsrc\grass1.bmp
texsrc\decidforest.bmp
texsrc\grassfeild0.bmp
texsrc\grassfeilds.bmp
texsrc\roughgrass.bmp
texsrc\pineforest.bmp
texsrc\highmeadow.bmp
texsrc\rockgrass.bmp
texsrc\rock.bmp
texsrc\rocksnow.bmp
texsrc\snow.bmp


atlas,
1024,ImageSize
4,ChannelCnt
2,rows
2,cols
texsrc\farm1.bmp
texsrc\village.bmp
texsrc\mountain.bmp
texsrc\cliff.bmp

[CptTrips]

For the moment, lets worry about the swa later.  It shouldn't effect you seeing the proper bitmaps.

You atlas look about right. 

Did you also edit catlas0 and catlas1?

I had edited mine with local paths too.  I can't remeber if that was needed, but might be worth a try.  Mine:

atlas,
512,ImageSize
1,ChannelCnt
4,rows
4,cols
texsrc\sandClutter.bmp
texsrc\dunesClutter.bmp
texsrc\dryscrubClutter.bmp
texsrc\drygrassClutter.bmp
texsrc\erosiongrassClutter.bmp
texsrc\grass1Clutter.bmp
texsrc\decidforestClutter.bmp
texsrc\grassfeild0Clutter.bmp
texsrc\grassfeildsClutter.bmp
texsrc\roughgrassClutter.bmp
texsrc\pineforestClutter.bmp
texsrc\highmeadowClutter.bmp
texsrc\rockgrassClutter.bmp
texsrc\rockClutter.bmp
texsrc\rocksnowClutter.bmp
texsrc\snowClutter.bmp



atlas,
1024,ImageSize
1,ChannelCnt
2,rows
2,cols
texsrc\farm1clutter.bmp
texsrc\villageclutter.bmp
texsrc\cratersclutter.bmp
texsrc\cliffclutter.bmp

[CptTrips]

Oh, and you only need to change the read-only attribute on the swa file that you need to write to.  Unless you just want to do them all.